Participants wanting to relate their "aha moments" — ranging from career and hobby insights to lessons learned coping with injury or disease — sign up to be interviewed in the tour's video-studio-equipped Airstream trailer, she said.

Videos of the interviews are professionally edited and then sent back to participants via a YouTube link, she said. They are also posted to the project's website, ahamoment.com, and considered for inclusion in Mutual of Omaha's television advertising campaign.

"It's really conversational," Castle said, saying they don't expect people to come in with a prepared statement.

"It's a really powerful thing to get people's stories out there," Castle said. They've seen everything from a woman diagnosed with brain cancer who has now run 14 triathlons in the past year to an Oklahoma City couple who took a well-received eggroll recipe and built it into a food truck chain.

Great Falls is the 15th of 20 cities on this year's tour route, and the only stop in Montana. By the time the crew is done, it will have traveled 9,300 miles.

Crew members, in Great Falls on Monday and Tuesday, said they'll be available to listen to people on a drop-in basis Tuesday outside the Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art.

"It's free for people to come and share," Castle said.

Carol Lea Bushnell of Helena never thought she'd be interested in working with special needs kids, she said.

But then her late husband, Joe, got a job as an attendant for a school bus ferrying special needs children. Zach Hardman, then 10, was one of the passengers — and was known for throwing punches amid tantrums.

Joe Bushnell began to work with Zach, his wife said, and was ultimately offered a job helping care for him and kids in similar situations. At one point, Carol Lea Bushnell said, their family ended up taking in Zach as a foster child.

Her aha moment "kind of happened gradually," she said. As her husband's health declined before his death from cancer last year, she took on more and more of Zach's care. Now, she works not one but two jobs with special needs children, one that involves taking care of Zach two or three days a week to give his mother a break.

Recently, Bushnell saw a description of Zach written by another care provider, she said. "It had been the exact type of person my husband was trying to make him into," she said. "He turned Zach around."

On Monday, Bushnell and Hardman, now 18, ducked inside the Airstream trailer to tell their story together.

After a "horrific" accident in 2000, Sandy Haddenham of Great Falls was told she shouldn't ride a horse again.

But riding, she said "is my passion and my life."

Then she heard about a therapeutic riding program put on by Eagle Mount in Great Falls. At first, she was hesitant, but then signed up — and got her doctor's OK.

Now, after reclaiming her passion, she's working toward becoming a therapeutic riding instructor to give back to the program.

"It's only right to give back to the people who gave so much to me, and the places that gave so much to me," Haddenham said. "I'll be at Eagle Mount till they kick me out."